If you have type 2 diabetes, lifestyle disease may be an accurate way to describe your condition. It doesn’t feel comfortable, and many don’t like to face the cold hard facts, but it is probably an accurate way to describe type 2 diabetes. Lifestyle disease is a way to describe a condition that is brought about by the way you live, the choices about your health that you make, and the way you interact with the environment around you.

Lifestyle diseases can be ailments, disorders, or diseases that you suffer with because of the way you live your life and how you choose to take care of your own health needs. The most dangerous of these is diabetes. Lifestyle disease diagnosis’s used to be made, on average, around the age of 40. Soon, doctors and other experts think that average age will move down into the mid-thirties.

 

Causes of Diabetes Lifestyle Disease

 

Before you dismiss this, take a moment to consider your own lifestyle, or perhaps the lifestyle of someone you know who is unhealthy and has type 2 diabetes. Lifestyle disease causes include a sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy eating, substance abuse (drugs and/or alcohol), smoking, and stress. Now take a look at your lifestyle.

  • How many packaged or processed foods do you eat? Most Americans eat junk food many times a week, and when at home resort to eating processed and packaged foods that are high in calories and low in nutrition.
  • How many hours a day do you spend sitting in front of the television? There is not much you can do more sedentary than watching television. And despite the constant drumbeat of calls to exercise more, it is not uncommon for a person to watch 20 – 30 hours of television in a week. In other words, sitting down doing nothing for 20 or 30 hours in a week. And maybe while watching your favorite shows, you bring that bag of snacks and calorie-laden soft drink with you. This is a recipe for becoming overweight.
  • Even children sit in front of video games for hours instead of going outside to play and exercise as they did generations ago.
  • Many people routinely put in 10 – 12 hour days at work, leaving little time to relax and unwind. Is there really anyone that wonders why we are more stressed out in our 24 hour a day, seven day a week world?
  • Drug and alcohol abuse is again on the rise, even though smoking rates in the U.S. are on the decline.

 

So as uncomfortable as the truth may be, is it really any wonder diabetes is on the rise? Diabetes – lifestyle disease? You bet it is.